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A crackdown on political dissent is well under way in Germany. Over the past two years, institutions and authorities have cancelled events, exhibitions and awards over statements about Palestine or Israel. There are many examples: the Frankfurt book fair indefinitely postponing an award ceremony for Adania Shibli; the Heinrich Böll Foundation withdrawing the Hannah Arendt prize from Masha Gessen; the University of Cologne rescinding a professorship for Nancy Fraser; the No Other Land directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham being defamed by German ministers. And, most recently, the philosopher Omri Boehm being disinvited from speaking at this month’s anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald.
In nearly all of these cases, accusations of antisemitism loom large – even though Jews are often among those being targeted. More often than not, it is liberals driving or tacitly accepting these cancellations, while conservatives and the far right lean back and cheer them on. While vigilance against rising antisemitism is no doubt warranted – especially in Germany – that concern is increasingly weaponised as a political tool to silence the left.
Germany has recently taken a chilling new step, signalling its willingness to use political views as grounds to curb migration. Authorities are now moving to deport foreign nationals for participating in pro-Palestine actions. As I reported this week in the Intercept, four people in Berlin – three EU citizens and one US citizen – are set to be deported over their involvement in demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza. None of the four have been convicted of a crime, and yet the authorities are seeking to simply throw them out of the country.
The accusations against them include aggravated breach of the peace and obstruction of a police arrest. Reports from last year suggest that one of the actions they were alleged to have been involved in included breaking into a university building and threatening people with objects that could have been used as potential weapons.
But the deportation orders go further. They cite a broader list of alleged behaviours: chanting slogans such as “Free Gaza” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, joining road blockades (a tactic frequently used by climate activists), and calling a police officer a “fascist”. Read closely, the real charge appears to be something more basic: protest itself.
All four are also accused – without evidence – of supporting Hamas and of chanting antisemitic or anti-Israel slogans. Three of the deportation orders explicitly cite Germany’s national commitment to defend Israel, its so-called Staatsräson, or reason of state, as justification.
Legal experts told me that invoking Staatsräson in deportation proceedings is legally dubious. A recent parliamentary review reached a similar conclusion, noting that Staatsräson – often cited to justify Germany’s foreign policy toward Israel, including the plan of the incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to invite Benjamin Netanyahu despite an active international criminal court arrest warrant – carries no legally enforceable weight.
This kind of repression isn’t new in Germany. The lawyer Alexander Gorski told me he has handled similar cases where migration law was used against people of Arab or Palestinian descent – often triggered by a social media post, comment or even just a “like”.
Today, politicians across Germany’s political spectrum routinely invoke the country’s history to silence criticism of Israeli policy – backing a state accused of enforcing apartheid in the West Bank and, as a growing consensus among human rights experts argues, committing genocide in Gaza.
Using immigration law to police political protest sends a clear message to non-citizens in Germany: speak out and you may risk losing your status – or being deported. The extent to which this plays into the hands of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) seems lost on much of Germany’s so-called political centre. For the AfD, Staatsräson has become a convenient shield: a way to stoke resentment against migrants allegedly “importing” antisemitism and push back against a broader, more inclusive culture of remembrance, often reductively dismissed as “postcolonialism”. All of it is cloaked in the language of unwavering support for Israel.
The AfD recently secured about 20% of the vote in Germany’s federal elections. Just weeks before the election, Elon Musk expressed his support for the party during a live discussion with its leader, Alice Weidel. At one point, Weidel absurdly called Adolf Hitler “a communist” and claimed that “leftish Palestinians” in Germany are antisemitic. As outrageous as these remarks were, they reflect a broader trend that the liberal centre unwillingly helped to normalise – a drift that exploits anti-Palestinian sentiment to fuel far-right revisionism.
While Germany’s established parties still formally reject cooperation with the AfD, their growing accommodation of AfD-style rhetoric – especially on migration – tells a different story. In the runup to the election, parties across the spectrum, from the Greens to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), spoke about migration as a security threat, and promised deportations and tighter controls. In this climate, Palestine has turned into somewhat of a litmus test for asylum policy.
Last year, Merz declared that Germany would not accept refugees from Gaza, stating: “We already have enough antisemitic young men in the country.” After the newly elected Die Linke MP Cansın Köktürk recently appeared in parliament wearing a scarf resembling a keffiyeh, members of the conservative CDU pushed to ban such symbols in parliament. No such objection was raised when the AfD MP Torben Braga wore a blue cornflower – a symbol used by Austrian Nazis in the 1930s – in the same chamber. Braga said it was not a cornflower and called the accusation “absurd”.
With a new conservative government in power, the crackdown on Palestinians and migrants – already well under way with the so-called traffic-light coalition – is set to escalate even further. Germany is at a crossroads: it can choose to uphold the principles it claims to stand for, or continue down a path of authoritarianism. For now, the direction seems unmistakably clear.
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Hanno Hauenstein is a Berlin-based journalist and author. He worked as a senior editor in Berliner Zeitung’s culture department, specialising in contemporary art and politics
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